Macer Hall

Political Editor of the Daily Express

Inside Politics: It's crunch time for battling PM

LIKE a First World War infantryman preparing to go over the top and march into the barbed wire and machine-gun fire, Theresa May is preparing for her big Commons vote this Tuesday with a sense of duty and foreboding.

The opposition forces lined up against the Prime Minister's EU Withdrawal Agreement appear insurmountable. Her strategists are focused on winning a few feet of political ground rather than achieving the breakthrough towards ultimate victory. Ahead of the Commons division about supporting her deal with Brussels, her generals are already plotting future battles amid expectations that she will have to return for a second and possibly third attempt at rallying a majority behind the package.

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They hope that the almost certain hammering for the deal this week will at last force some genuine concessions from the EU.

During the 2005 general election campaign, Labour aides boasted of a strategy that involved the then prime minister, Tony Blair, being repeatedly thrust before audiences of hostile voters on television debate shows.

The idea was that their leader could win by demonstrating his ability to withstand adversity.

Mrs May and her advisers have taken that approach to a frightening new level by subjecting her to cruel and unusual punishment at the hands of her parliamentary torturers preparing to inflict a defeat of humiliating proportions.

The spectators that matter this time, however, are in Brussels and other EU capitals rather than in the electorate.

And while EU chiefs will be watching the expected defeat at Westminster on Tuesday evening closely, many senior Tories fear the bureaucrats don't realise how dangerous the threat a failure to agree a deal poses to the bloc.

"The Government has misjudged how the EU works if they are really expecting concessions that will make any difference," one veteran Brussels insider told me.

"Decision making is achingly slow. And once the bureaucracy has finally made up its mind, it can be impossible to change it."

EU officials are understood not to have seriously contemplated any change to their painstakingly compiled deal whatsoever.

In the UK, the Remainers' "Project Fear" campaign has plucked plenty of imaginary figures out of the air to raise jitters about the economic impact domestically of a no-deal Brexit.

Yet in Brussels, there has been no concern raised about the very real figure of £39billion that the EU is set to lose out on in the event of no-deal.

But the withholding of a substantial slice of the cash, even temporarily, would be calamitous for the bloc's budget. Brussels urgently needs its own "project fear" based on that fact.

No Brexit deal with Britain is plainly not in the EU's interests.

Yet the Brussels bureaucracy's track record in making key decisions has been dire and self-destructive in recent years.

The launch of the euro, the austerity budgets imposed on southern European nations, the multi-billion bailouts and the attempt to coordinate economic policy across a diverse continent show that utopian federalist dreaming rather than rational thought is what drives the EU.

Less than three months from Brexit, many EU officials still cling to the belief that the departure can be thwarted.

They seem to have forgotten that the March 29 exit date has been written onto the UK statute book.

Only a series of parliamentary votes to repeal the Withdrawal Act - in direct opposition to the 2016 referendum result - could alter that fact.

As Tuesday's vote looms, MPs of all parties are wary of making any predictions about what will happen if and when the Government loses.

None of them should rule out Britain quitting the EU without a deal - and plunging the EU into a financial crisis - simply as a result of the incompetence and pig-headedness of European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and his useless gang.